Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (review)

In Walker's turgidly theoretical introduction, she generally dismisses what she calls the "conventional" reading of texts and records that has made writing social history during the last forty years such a fruitful endeavor. According to Walker, historians of crime "identify patterns in social behaviour by, for example, counting numbers of indictments and analyzing statistically verdicts and sentences over time" (1). Much more than quantitative analysis infuses the work of such historians as Peter King and John Beattie, whom she mentions as working in the "older" social history style. But Walker does not entirely abandon methods drawn from "positivist social science" or "history from below" in her own work (2). She combines both qualitative and quantitative analysis. Overall, however, she contends that only a different sort of analysis, based particularly on Mikhail Bakhtin's theories, can discover the underlying social, legal, popular, and religious conceptions that informed the treatment of men and women by the law and courts in early modern Cheshire, England. Readers might do well to skip the first chapter orread it last, because Walker has, despite scattering her text with the impenetrable jargon of discourse analysis, written a deeply interesting account of early modern life and crime.

Walker is most successful when writing a cultural history of crime and gender. Masculinity and femininity figure heavily in her examination of not just who committed particular crimes, but how men and women committing the same crimes could be treated differently because of society's beliefs about the proper behavior for each sex. She takes exception, for instance, to historians who view "the sentencing of men as standard" in homicide cases and try "to argue that women's sentencing was "lenient" or "harsh" (158). Her careful presentation of homicide law as having "gendered vision" allows her to argue convincingly that the two sexes "were not sentenced differently for homicides that were perceived to be alike" (158). The legal perception makes all the difference. Except in the case of infanticide, women's killings "nearly always looked like willful murders" to the law (158). Men had their honor to defend or preserve, but since society allowed women no real right to such a defense, they were usually convicted of murder rather than manslaughter.

Many accepted ideas about women and crime in the past fall before Walker's close reading of court records, ballads, moral essays, and literary sources. She finds no hard and fast division of male crime and female crime. Women were burglars and housebreakers; they stole items of great value; they fought, resisted, and murdered. In the context of the time, however, their behavior was often viewed as unnatural, or even unmanly, more evil than that of men.

By bringing the tools of gender studies, discourse analysis, and social history to bear on her subject, Walker has ultimately produced a work of great richness, illuminating early modern English society in all its raucous, disorderly, contentious, opinionated, and colorful ways.